Omni-reflectance and enhanced resonant tunneling from multilayers containing left-handed materials

We study the oblique transmission through a one-dimensional photonic crystal consisting of alternating slabs made of ordinary and negative refractive index materials, the latter being dispersive. We investigate the angular dependence of the band gap for this multilayer medium. Our results suggest, unlike a conventional Bragg gap, this type of gap exhibits a rather versatile behavior with varying angle of incidence. We find the angle-dependent characteristics for this type of gap can be quite different for different structural parameters of the constituents. Thus, multilayer structures involving left-handed components are very good candidates for band gap engineering. Specifically, we demonstrate for a certain experimentally realizable structure, the existence of a gap region for each individual polarization which survives for incident angles as high as 85 °°. Moreover, we show how this structure can also function as a highly efficient polarization splitter. Finally, we investigate the multilayer medium when acting as single or double electromagnetic barrier. We study the tunneling properties of such systems for both types of individual barrier layers—right- and left-handed, respectively. We observe the double barrier exhibits resonant tunneling that depends on the “rightness” of the individual barrier layers.